User Experience in packaging design ft. Dot & Key

The beauty industry operates mainly on insecurity, pretty packaging and a lot of “naturally derived” chemicals. In spite of being in advertising and marketing myself, I end up getting enticed by them and buy a lot of skincare and makeup products.

I’ve been through the usuals for luxury products, the holy grails, the economic practicals, and the cutesy products. In the last few years, What did take over the Indian market is the new-age products which were the “offbeat” brands. Brands like L’oreal, Neutrogena, Vaseline, Nivea couldn’t penetrate into the growing Indian craze for Korean skincare, Newer younger entrepreneurial brands started coming and capturing that market with their spot-on products with Korean “essences” but made specifically climatized for Indian problems. Some brands still struggle to create their image. But some have succeeded in disrupting the Indian market. One brand to talk about specifically is Dot & Key.

To be honest, the product packaging is not unique, it’s “inspired” from multiple brands, especially Frudia, a Korean skincare brand. 8/10 for picking a not-so-well-known-in-India Korean brand. I guess the trick is that if 75% of your target audience doesn’t know the origins of the product design, then it’s sort of a win. 

Of course in the end the product quality also matters, but that is a different kind of blog I guess. The branding and packaging of Dot & Key seems on point with the TG. It’s almost just pretentious enough to expand its likes to the luxe edits. The pastel colours are great, the packaging shapes are fun and playful. It’s cutesy and yet it gives you that you’re picking up some young product from Sephora. The brand is easily available everywhere and it’s relatively easy on the pockets which also contributes to it having a Gen-Z fan following. 

Apart from the visually appealing products, I love their brand language as well. For example, instead of using Before & After for images, they use a “Beautiful before, and Beautiful after” line.

I’ve personally used some of their products - like the Vit C super moisturiser, the tea tree toner, and while the product itself is good, in terms of texture and feel, the one Mumbai-problem or rather first-world-problem I faced is, the products are not stackable. We can stack the Dot & Key product on top of some other brand product, but because of their rounded top, we can’t put another product on top of it. Their newer photoshoots on social media look like they have made this change in their packaging, but I recently bought one more product, and it had the same rounded top. 

For a lot of people who live in confined spaces, or are used to keeping multiple products together, stackable qualities are much needed. Especially when Korean skincare has a 10-step routine and 10 different products for the same.

Reference: https://www.studioglyph.in/dot-key